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Artist pays tribute to celebrity deaths of 2016 using Beatles album cover

Using the Beatles’ iconic Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band album cover, artist Chris Barker created an image featuring the celebrities who have died this year.

British graphic designer and illustrator Chris Barker created a montage of all the celebrities that have died in 2016 plus some events, using the iconic cover art from Sgt Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band. (Twitter image)

British graphic designer Chris Barker was watching U.S. election results when it became clear that Hillary Clinton would not win. For him, it was a surreal feeling he’d had before.

“It felt like the night was about to go a bit Brexit. A bit Leicester City. A bit 2016,” he wrote on his Tumblr. “What a year, I was thinking, David Bowie, Brexit and now this.”

So he sat down and started to make “a montage that summed up how weird a year it’s been.”

The image he ended up with paid homage to the passing of many celebrities using the Beatles’ Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band album cover, and has now been widely circulated online.

“This image was never made with publication in mind. It was kind of a cathartic thing for me really,” Barker told the Star in an email. “Yeah I put it on the Internet but I thought a couple of hundred people, tops, would see it.”

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The photo is by no means exhaustive, according to Barker, who said for the last month, he’s been receiving “lists and lists of international personalities” that he didn’t include.

“They keep sending me lists of people I’ve missed,” Barker wrote. “I simply can’t add everyone in the whole world from every walk of life who died this year, really, can I? But also it wasn’t originally going to be just the departed on the image. There was going to be other things on there too, hence Brexit, the Trump hat and the Leicester City FC rosette.”

But since creating the photo in November, he has included a few people he missed and others who have died since he started the project, including Leonard Cohen, George Michael, and Carrie Fisher.

“They just kept coming and it sort of felt rude not to. I was getting messages, lots of messages, every time someone died,” Barker wrote. ‘It got quite ridiculous. I had to start tweeting to say ‘yes I am aware of the sad passing of . . . ’ Like press releases!”

His latest addition? Debbie Reynolds, who died on Wednesday, and was placed alongside her daughter Fisher in the photo, who passed away the day before her.

“Debbie Reynolds has been added yes. Another incredibly sad addition to the image,” Barker wrote. “That couldn’t have been more difficult to find a good graphic solution to and I hope I’ve done her proud.”

The entire experience has been “surreal, slightly overwhelming but thoroughly interesting,” according to Barker. He just asks that people who see the photo consider donating to a charity of their choice or the Jo Cox Memorial fund, which honours the British MP who was assassinated by a man with white-supremacist ties before the Brexit vote.

As for next year, Barker said he doesn’t know what his plans are yet. For now, he’s satisfied with his 2016 image.

“I hope it’s made people smile, think about how short life is, and how much we all have in common.”

Correction – January 10, 2016: This article was edited from a previous version that said the artist had included people he missed, like Leonard Cohen, when in fact he added Cohen after he died.

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